I've been watching the news of the tragic building collapse in Florida.?ÿ The only words that come to mind are horrible and tragic.?ÿ My prayers to the families.
I'm left wondering how this event will affect period structural inspections in not only Florida but elsewhere.
Here is another example from 40 years ago that will not soon be forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
Rather different circumstances from the recent Florida event, that early reports are blaming on deterioration.
The walkway collapsed because the design was structurally sound but impractical to build, so it got constructed in an unsound shortcut manner.
I viewed the news provided video from the adjacent condo the morning it happened. I had a slightly visceral flashback to 2001, knowing as I watched the horrible event that was happening.
I figured that the entire coastline will be getting inspection and deficiency is going to be flagged heavily.
Its disturbing that the tragedy happened at all, except to delay the repairs that seem to have been known for sometime now.
Deepest Condolences for the losses and to their families. This shouldn't have happened. Ever.
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When buildings, or portions thereof, fail resulting in the death of many people and the injuring of others a little bit of everything will be considered to find the deepest pockets to go after for damages.?ÿ SOMEONE will be declared to be at fault or SOME PROCEDURE will declared to be the cause, which goes back to the SOMEONE.
In the mid-1970's The John Hancock Tower provided this hazard to life and limb, thanks to insufficient design.
There were problems with the innovative use of blue?ÿreflective glass?ÿin a steel tower: entire 4?ý ?? 11?ý, 500-lb (1.2 ?? 3.4 m, 227?ÿkg) windowpanes detached from the building and crashed to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below. Police closed off surrounding streets whenever winds reached 45?ÿmph (72?ÿkm/h). Under the direction of Frank H. Durgin of?ÿMIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel a scale model of the entire Back Bay and an aeroelastic model of the John Hancock Tower were built and tested in the?ÿwind tunnel?ÿto identify the problem. The research raised questions about the structural integrity of the entire building (due to unanticipated twisting of the structure), but did not account for the loss of the glass panels. An independent laboratory eventually confirmed that the failure of the glass was due to oscillations and repeated?ÿthermal stresses?ÿcaused by the expansion and contraction of the air between the inner and outer glass panels which formed each window; the resilient bonding between the inner glass, reflective material, and outer glass was so stiff that it was transmitting the force to the outer glass (instead of absorbing it), thus causing the glass to fail.[8]
The John Hancock Tower seen from the?ÿPrudential Tower; on the left is?ÿCopley Square?ÿ(and?ÿTrinity Church), to the upper left is the?ÿBoston Common, on the right is the?ÿMassachusetts Turnpike?ÿ(I-90) and to the top right is?ÿLogan International Airport.
In October 1973, I.M. Pei & Partners announced that all 10,344 window panes would each be replaced by single-paned, heat-treated panels at a total cost between $5 million and $7 million.[8][7]?ÿApproximately 5,000 of the original glass panes were removed intact, and were later offered for re-use by?ÿartists.[9]
During the many months it took to diagnose and repair the building, sheets of?ÿplywood?ÿreplaced many of the missing glass windows of the building, earning it the nicknames "Plywood Palace" and "Plywood Ranch" (the same name as a local?ÿlumber yard?ÿchain at the time). Bostonians joked that the Hancock Tower was "the world's tallest plywood building".
Tyler Ley gives this really good explanation of the causes of the?ÿI-35 Bridge Collapse. I very much suspect that the story on the Surfside Condo will follow a similar pattern.?ÿ Weakness in the design and/or initial construction, followed by years of deferred maintenance, and finally some ill-informed effort at said maintenance becomes the straw that breaks the camels back.?ÿ?ÿ
When buildings, or portions thereof, fail resulting in the death of many people and the injuring of others a little bit of everything will be considered to find the deepest pockets to go after for damages.?ÿ SOMEONE will be declared to be at fault or SOME PROCEDURE will declared to be the cause, which goes back to the SOMEONE.
Multiple entities will pay.?ÿ I would hate to be the guy who submitted the deficiency report, because he didn't say that the building would fall down.?ÿ The report I saw talked a lot about water getting in through windows and/or doors, the need for window washer anchor points, and deterioration and cracking problems especially with the pool deck, but a casual read did not highlight the seriousness.
All structures intended to survive many hurricanes and tropical storms over their design lifetimes should be inspected carefully on some mandatory schedule. "?ÿtalked a lot about water getting in through windows and/or doors,"?ÿ That sounds extremely possible in such areas, repeatedly.
For those of us in tornado-prone areas, the thought of designing all structures to withstand a direct hit by an EF-5 tornado is not realistic.?ÿ There would be practically no aboveground structures to achieve that goal.?ÿ Agricultural structures that rarely have humans inside them are designed based on 25-year frequencies for wind loads and snow loads.?ÿ That is why the devastating Iowa derecho showed a high level of destruction of such structures.
@holy-cow The same can be said about flood prone areas here in Houston.?ÿ You can't regulate or design for all eventualities.?ÿ There will always be some risk, no matter where you live.
And I can hope we all agree this goes beyond the risk involved, similar to the challenger disaster, risk was falsely reduced to appear far less than it really was, and when Feynman asked around figured instead of 1:300000 of a catastrophic disaster, it was really closer to 1:300 or less, and history proved less still.
Risk is a part of the process. Minimizing the cost with the best risk profile is the goal.
There's likely more at play here, like money, and a willingness to not spend it. And results are self explanatory.
Condo boards in general are horrendously under qualified most times to make critical infrastructure decisions, and I'm predicting this will come out in the investigation.
@bill93?ÿ
https://www.foxnews.com/us/miami-condo-collapse-woman-told-husband-pool-cave-in
Article quotes one of the inspectors. He says that report was basically run of the mill for a 40 year old building in that area...
I was working for a large construction firm when that building in NOLA collapsed a little over a year and a half ago.?ÿ Man, talk about waking everyone up!?ÿ We had a 30-story building going up at the time, nearly topped out, and everyone was tip toeing around nervous!
From what I have read there were quite a few delays during the construction. My first suspicion is the rebar was exposed to saltwater air for too long and that resulting corrosion reduced the concrete rebar bond. With the time since construction any bond was lost. There is way too much fully exposed rebar seen in photos.
Paul in PA, PE, PLS
Risk is a difficult concept even for experts. One of the huge conceptual problems is assessing risk in individual cases. For example, we may know that x% of buildings like the condo are in imminent danger of collapse, but that means that (100 - x)% are not. Identifying individual cases that are and are not, within group probabilities, is difficult.
But that's the job of building inspectors and insurance underwriters, among others. I have to wonder if the insurer was aware of the structural report. On the other hand, long-term deterioration unattended to voids many coverages, so they may be entitled to the premium and also entitled to deny coverage of this particular loss. It will be complicated and everybody will run for the exits.
Probabilities are often infinitesimal and sometimes zero, but infinitesimal and zero are not equal. As stupid as they sound, these disasters will never be eliminated.
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